Michael Holtz
January 17, 2025
The New Yorker
Last summer, I followed Matthew O’Callaghan, a field officer for the humanitarian mine-clearance organization the HALO Trust, along a narrow line of trees in the flat, open countryside of northeastern Ukraine, about thirty miles outside the city of Kharkiv. We stopped in front of a patch of overgrown grass that was cordoned off with red-and-white tape. O’Callaghan pointed down at a green metal stake. Attached to the stake was a trip wire, and attached to the trip wire was, presumably, an OZM-72 antipersonnel mine. “We haven’t found the OZM yet,” O’Callaghan said. I anxiously scanned the grass to see where it might be. More than five hundred feet away, hidden beneath the trees, was an abandoned Russian trench. It was what the mine was there to defend, even though the soldiers who had once occupied it were long gone. The deminers assigned to the tree line had so far found two OZMs and three grenades on trip wires. A third OZM had been set off by a dog; it was killed on the spot.
An OZM-72 is what’s known as a bounding fragmentation mine. When someone makes contact with a trip wire, it triggers a pint-glass-size metal cannister to shoot into the air and explode in a hail of shrapnel that can kill someone standing as far as eighty feet away. OZMs are among the deadliest mines that Russian forces have used in Ukraine since Vladimir Putin launched an invasion of the country, in February of 2022. They’re also among the most dangerous to clear. In the summer of 2023, a HALO deminer was killed by one in southern Ukraine; two others were injured in the same incident. The deminers near Kharkiv didn’t want to take any chances. They planned to cut the grass around the trip wire with a Robocut T800, an eighty-thousand-dollar industrial-sized, remotecontrolled lawnmower on tank treads, in the hopes of detonating any nearby mines. O’Callaghan told me that T800s can withstand a head-on blast from an OZM. “If it hits side-on,” he said, “then it can do a ton of damage.”
At the far end of the tree line, next to a recently harvested wheat field, yellow stakes marked where four TM-62 anti-vehicle mines had been found. Close by, a deminer wearing a blue protective vest and a face shield swung a metal detector over what looked like a red poker chip. It was one of three within a twenty-foot stretch, each one marking where a metal signal had been found. After confirming that the signal was still there, the deminer got on his hands and knees and began to excavate the spot slowly with a trowel. O’Callaghan didn’t expect the deminer to dig up any TM-62s—the four found earlier had been only partially buried—but, to be safe, he had to investigate every signal, even if they turned out to be coming from something as innocuous as sodacan tabs. O’Callaghan pointed to two tree lines in the distance where a survey team had found evidence of more mines. “There’s lots of work to do here,” he said.
Although Donald Trump has promised to bring a swift end to the war after he takes office, on January 20th, the same slow, tedious work is taking place across Ukraine—work that will continue long after the fighting is over. According to the Ukrainian government, sixty-seven thousand square miles of the country—an area the size of Florida, in a country slightly smaller than the size of Texas—has potentially been contaminated with mines and so-called explosive remnants of war, things like cluster munitions, missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, and artillery and mortar shells.
The actual area requiring demining is certain to be much smaller—thirteen thousand five hundred square miles have already been cleared or deemed uncontaminated—but proving that this land is safe will still require an enormous amount of time and resources. The World Bank estimates that surveying and clearing Ukraine will cost $34.6 billion, or a fifth of the country’s gross domestic product.
Then there is the human toll. Mines and explosive remnants of war in Ukraine have killed three hundred and twenty-one civilians and injured seven hundred and seventy-four others since the start of the conflict. (Among them, sixteen children have been killed and eighty-eight have been injured.) The week before I arrived in Kharkiv, six people were killed when their car ran over a TM62 on a dirt road just north of the city. Police officers found the body of the youngest victim, a two-month-old girl, fifty feet from the site of the explosion. “In the de-occupied territories of the region, wherever the Russians went, such deadly ‘gifts’ were left,” Serhii Bolvinov, the head of investigations for the Ukrainian national police in Kharkiv, wrote on social media. He urged people to stay out of wooded areas and only drive on paved roads.
Ukrainian farmers have been hit especially hard. A team of researchers from NASA found that in 2024, 5.9 million acres—or nearly eight per cent—of Ukraine’s cropland lay abandoned, resulting in more than a billion dollars’ worth of lost crops, enough to feed millions of people for a year. Mykoli Kalatay, a thirty-six-year-old farmer who lives with his wife and two children, a sixteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son, in a village thirty miles southeast of Kharkiv, told me that he hadn’t been able to cultivate his seven-acre sunflower field since 2021. The following year, in the early days of the war, Russian troops captured the village. They set up an artillery position at a local sawmill and took over the houses of local residents who had fled. Kalatay and his family were stuck there for a month. As he tells it, only after bribing a Russian officer with an electric razor were they allowed to leave. They made their way to western Ukraine, where they stayed with his wife’s uncle. Kalatay returned to the village on September 12, 2022, a few days after it was liberated. His family joined him that December.
On the day I met Kalatay, he was leaning against the hood of a white transport van that was parked in front of his house. The windshield of the van was cracked and had two bullet holes in it, vestiges of the fighting that he and his family had narrowly escaped. The house had been damaged, too: windows broken, parts of the roof caved in. “I repaired it myself,” Kalatay said. He led me around the back of the home, to a wood pile. He pulled from it a rusted piece of an artillery shell that he had found in his cabbage patch. “The field was covered in stuff like this,” he said. In the sunflower field, he had found four unexploded submunitions from a rocket. He reported them to HALO, and was waiting for the organization to send out a disposal team. In the
meantime, he had told his children to stay out of the field and avoid bushes and tall grass. “I thank God that they haven’t been hurt,” he said.
It’s estimated that in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, more than a hundred million mines lay spread across Europe. To clear them, countries including France, Denmark, and the Netherlands often relied on German prisoners of war. Thousands were killed. The 1949 Geneva Convention explicitly forbade the use of P.O.W.s for demining. Conveniently, most of the minefields in Europe had been cleared by then. For decades afterward, demining was done, if it was done at all, by national militaries. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, in 1988, that the United Nations decided to step in. The Afghan military was in disarray, and the Soviet military refused to do anything about the millions of mines that it had laid. With the help of donor countries, the U.N. organized two-week training courses on the basics of mine clearance. The courses were attended by more than ten thousand Afghan refugees, leading to the creation of the first humanitarian mine-action program in the world.
The sector got a huge publicity boost when, on January 15, 1997, a twenty-eight-year old HALO program manager named Paul Heslop was tasked with guiding Princess Diana through a minefield in Angola. The visit made headlines around the world. Eleven months later—and three months after Diana’s death—a hundred and twenty-two countries signed what would become known as the Ottawa Treaty, which bans the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of antipersonnel mines. The number of signatories has since grown to a hundred and sixty-four; Ukraine is one of them. Notable holdouts include the United States, China, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Russia.
Today, more than forty countries have established humanitarian mine-action programs with support from the U.N. and mine-clearance groups. HALO is one of the largest, but there are hundreds of other such organizations. Seventy-three are currently operating in Ukraine. The country needs all the help it can get. Heslop, who for the past two years has worked as an adviser for the United Nations in Ukraine, told me, “You’re talking about millions and millions and millions of explosive items.” And current estimates don’t take into account the latest developments: on November 19th, the Biden Administration revealed that it would supply Ukraine with antipersonnel mines to help reinforce the country’s frontline defenses. These mines are designed to self-destruct after a set period of time—this is meant to prevent casualties from mines planted in long-dormant battlefields. Even if no mines are left operational at the end of the war—a big “if”—Heslop said that clearing the front line was “going to be fucking hell.” In 2002, a report by the Government Accountability Office found that one in sixty American mines used in the Gulf War failed to self destruct, contrary to the Pentagon’s purported rate of one in ten thousand.
No one knows how long it will take to demine Ukraine. The nation is still dealing with unexploded munitions from the World Wars. Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Economy, Ihor Bezkaravainyi, who oversees humanitarian demining for the government—and who himself lost his lower left leg to a Russian mine, while fighting in the Donbas in 2015—told me that parts of the country would likely remain off limits indefinitely. “Probably we will have our own Zone Rouge,” he said, referring to an area in northeastern France that was so heavily contaminated
after the First World War that the French government deemed it uninhabitable. A cruel irony is that some of the mines may have been planted by the Ukrainians themselves. Human Rights Watch has found evidence that in September of 2022, Ukrainian forces had used antipersonnel mines near the eastern city of Izium when Russian forces had occupied the area, in violation of the Ottawa Treaty. Even just receiving the American mines, to say nothing of using them, would be another violation. When I put this to Bezkaravainyi, he told me that information related to the possible use of antipersonnel mines by Ukrainian forces was classified. “We are trying to understand how to deal with an enemy that has unlimited human resources,” he told me, while also “figuring out how to be in the treaty and adhere to international law.”
After leaving Kharkiv, I travelled to Mykolaiv, a port city in southern Ukraine. Russian forces had laid siege to the city in the winter and spring of 2022. More than half its population had fled. By the time I visited, the Russians had been pushed back to the left bank of the Dnipro River, about forty miles to the southeast, and local residents had started to rebuild. On streets and sidewalks around the city, what appeared to be submunition craters had been filled in with brightly colored paint, with the words “We remember” written underneath in Ukrainian.
In Mykolaiv, I met up with one of HALO’s teams specializing in explosive-ordnance disposal, or E.O.D. The leader of the team was a thirty-three-year-old woman named Natalia, who asked me not to use her last name because her family lives in the Russian-occupied east. Natalia is a former fashion model. She joined HALO, in 2020, as an interpreter. In the spring of 2022, with most Ukrainian men between the ages of eighteen and sixty banned from leaving the country, she and seven other Ukrainian women received funding to attend a two-month E.O.D.-training course in Kosovo. “It was a good opportunity,” she told me. “I wanted to do something useful for my country.” Natalia returned to Kosovo that fall for another two months of training, and she is currently certified to dispose of mines, rockets, artillery and mortar shells, submunitions, grenades, and small arms.
The object she and her team were sent to dispose of on the day I accompanied them was the tail of an eighty-five-millimetre PG-7 anti-tank rocket, a type of rocket-propelled grenade. A survey team had found it on a berm separating two fields, about an hour and a half’s drive east of Mykolaiv. I got a ride there with Tony Ballans, a global technical adviser at HALO, who was in Ukraine for seven weeks to supervise the organization’s E.O.D. teams. Ballans is a veteran of the British Army; he served in the Corps of Royal Engineers for thirty-seven years. “A lot of people think E.O.D. is sexy,” he said. “But it’s not. You spend a lot of time digging holes and filling sandbags.”
When we arrived at the berm, Natalia sent two of her four team members to do just that in the middle of a barren field on the opposite side of the road. She took the other two with her to collect the rocket tail. Ballans explained to me that it was safe to move because there was no warhead or fuse attached to it; all it contained was a motor and a pound of solid propellant, the substance that fires the rocket out of a launcher. To insure that the tail wasn’t booby-trapped, Natalia tied a rope to it, walked back more than a hundred and fifty feet, and pulled. Nothing happened. We waited ten minutes. Still nothing. “All clear,” Natalia said. She went to pick up the rocket tail, set it in a red canvas bag, and carried it across the road.
In the hole that her team members had dug was an empty metal shell from a larger rocket that they’d found in the area. Natalia laid the front half of the PG-7 inside the shell and surrounded it with sandbags. She then took a stick of thermite—a mixture of aluminum powder and iron oxide that burns at up to forty-five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, nearly half the temperature of the surface of the sun—and placed it perpendicular to the rocket tail. She fitted a firing cable to the thermite and walked back to the road. She attached a battery-powered trigger to the other end of the cable. “Prepare to fire,” she said. “Three, two, one.” She pressed the Fire button. From the hole came a sudden whoosh, followed by a plume of smoke. The propellant burned for nineteen seconds.
Natalia waited thirty minutes before going to collect what was left of the rocket tail. It had broken into two pieces. “Still hot,” she said as she picked them up. She took a few photographs with her phone and tossed the pieces onto a designated scrap pile on the side of the road. She and her team then headed back to the office in Mykolaiv to write up a report. It was all they had time to do that day.
Before returning to Mykolaiv ourselves, Ballans and I drove to a nearby village called Bezimenne— the name means “nameless” in Ukrainian and Russian—to look around. Our guide was the head of HALO’s survey team in the area, Ruslan Riabets. “We’ve found everything here,” Riabets said, and proceeded to list six types of Russian antipersonnel mines and three types of Russian anti vehicle mines. I asked whether any civilians had been killed or injured by them. He said that several months earlier, a man from the neighboring town of Snihurivka had been collecting firewood in Bezimenne when he stepped on a PMN-2 blast mine. “Fortunately, he only lost his foot,” Riabets said.
Bezimenne was little more than two rows of single-story stone and brick houses along a stretch of dirt road. Sixty-seven people had lived there before the war. All of them were now gone, and it was hard to imagine anyone moving back. Almost every building in the village had been razed. The few still standing were missing roofs, windows, and, in some cases, entire walls. Electrical lines dangled from concrete utility poles, and spent bullet casings and rockets littered the ground. I didn’t doubt that mines were all around us, too, hidden among the trees and fields that surrounded the village. “They’re perfect soldiers,” Ballans said, quoting a line attributed to the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. “They don’t have to sleep. They don’t have to eat. And they’ll do the job for decades.”
Michael Holtz is a freelance journalist currently based in Lviv, Ukraine. I’ve most recently written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. From 2016 to 2018, I was the Beijing bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. I previously worked for The Chicago Tribune and The Associated Press. Much of my reporting has focused on human rights, the environment, and rural communities. My work has been supported by grants from the Pulitzer Center, the Gumshoe Group, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the International Reporting Project. I graduated from the University of Kansas with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and political science. I’ve also received fellowships to study Chinese at Middlebury College in Vermont and Tsinghua University in Beijing.